


For Those Who Can't

by GoAwayOlivia



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics)
Genre: Case Fic, Character Study, Discussion of violence against children, Gen, Gotham can be a terrible place, Jason Todd's moral code, OC Character Death, drama and some angst, mentions of sexual assault on children, mentions of torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2019-10-13
Packaged: 2020-12-14 11:48:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21015290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoAwayOlivia/pseuds/GoAwayOlivia
Summary: They don’t understand him at all. There is no setting him off, that’s not the way it works. And he doesn’t go on violent sprees. Jason kills when the situation demands. That’s it. Plain and simple. He doesn’t lose his temper and murder any asshole that pisses him off. Every kill is a decision that he makes, and every decision is carefully weighed and measured with a cool head. He only ever kills because the person deserves to die.





	For Those Who Can't

**Author's Note:**

> Mind the tags. This is a case fic involving sexual assault and extreme violence against children. It's not explicitly written out, but be prepared. This is much more of an intense story than my usual stuff. I really wanted to delve into Jason's psyche and his moral code and why Gotham needs the Red Hood as well as Batman. 
> 
> As always, thinks to chibi_nightowl for being the best beta a person could ask for. Always goes above in beyond, not just editing but spitballing ideas and getting into in depth character discussion with me to make sure every story I write is the best it can be. I appreciate you more than you know.

The balance with the family has been extremely delicate since Jason’s return, so he isn’t all that surprised when it all comes crashing down in a spectacular display of fuckery and bullshit. It starts with Bruce sending him on an intel gathering mission with Dick. Dick needs the extra hands, but Bruce has been so busy with a serial killer case that he won’t be able to assist. If Jason can lend him a hand, Bruce would really appreciate it.

At first, Jason’s surprised Bruce is even asking. They’ve been coexisting in the same city for months now, but they’ve been doing so by mostly staying out of each other’s way. When Batman asks for his help, he’s so surprised at being included, at being possibly _trusted_, that he agrees without thinking about it.

It’s a mistake.

Two hours into his mission in Blüdhaven, not much is happening, but Jason hasn’t felt an overwhelming urge to punch Dick in the face, so that’s something at least. Dick actually seems like he’s enjoying himself as they hang out on the roof of a building that gives them a good sightline of the warehouse where things were supposed to go down an hour ago. The oldest bird doesn’t seem to be bothered that nothing’s happened yet though, and makes use of the time by talking Jason’s ear off, updating him on all the others and what they’ve been up to.

It’s not the worst night Jason’s spent with a member of the family.

“So where the hell are these guys?” he asks, stretching his neck to the side in an effort to help relieve the crick developing in it. “The only intel we’ve gathered so far is that they’re not punctual.”

Dick shrugs. “I’m sure they’ll show up eventually. There’s still plenty of time for it to happen tonight. We’ll give it a few more hours before we call it quits. Hey, did I tell you we finally got Robin to watch the original Star Wars?” he adds with a grin.

“Oh yeah?” Jason shoots back mildly, smirking under his helmet. “How’d that go?”

“Tell you the truth, I think Darth Vader was his favorite character,” Dick returns in a conspiratorial tone that has Jason snorting in amusement. “I’m a little concerned.”

“No kidding.”

Dick goes on, but Jason’s distracted by a notification on his phone. It’s a message from one of his informants.

_What’s the Bat doing in the Bowery?_

Jason freezes, blood going cold. Batman’s in the Bowery? What’s he doing in his territory? Why didn’t he tell him?

“Hood, you listening?” Dick asks, waving a hand in Jason’s helmeted face.

He looks up from his phone. “What’s Batman doing in the Bowery?”

Dick’s stiffens ever so slightly and for only half a second, but Jason still sees it. “I’m sure he’s just swinging by there for patrol since he knows you’re here in the Haven with me.”

“Bullshit,” Jason snarls. “Don’t fucking lie to me, Wing! I’m here with you because _he _asked me to help you out since _he’s _too busy with a case. So what the fuck is he doing in the Bowery?”

But he doesn’t need Dick to answer. It clicks easily in his mind now that he sees it. It’s so damn obvious that he’s a moron for not seeing it sooner. He’s being _babysat_. Bruce needed him out of the Bowery for whatever reason so he’d fed him some bullshit about gathering intel with Nightwing and sent him away, and Jason had fucking bought it hook line and sinker.

He’s an idiot. _Such _an idiot. _Of course _he isn’t actually being included. _Of course _he isn’t actually trusted. It shouldn’t hurt as much as it does, but his pride stings and deeper than that, far deeper than that, so do his feelings.

“You’re an asshole,” Jason snarls through whatever excuse Dick is spouting out and he turns on his heel to get the hell out of there. He can’t even look at him, he’s so mad. It’ll be an hour before he makes it back to the Bowery and Bruce will probably be gone by then, but he doesn’t care. He just wants to be back on his own ground and away from his asshole family.

“Hood,” Dick protests, grabbing his shoulder, and Jason lashes out, jerking out of Dick’s grip. He turns on his heel and clocks the other man across the face. Dick reels with the hit but doesn’t let up.

“Hood, just listen! The case he’s working, he thought the next body might turn up in the Bowery, and he was just trying to shield you from it.”

Dick reaches for his shoulder again and Jason snarls again, shoving him back. “He wanted me out of the damn way!” 

“For you! For both of you! Things have been good lately and he didn’t want anything to mess that up!”

“So he manipulates me?!” Jason demands. “And you let him? You _help _him do it?”

“Hood, stop! Don’t make it like that, it isn’t!”

“Fuck you, it’s exactly like that!” Jason snaps, turning away again, but this time Dick jumps in front of him, trying to cut him off. 

Jason throws another punch and Dick’s too worked up not to fight back. They end up rolling across the rooftop, each throwing kicks, punches, and elbows wherever they can. After a few minutes they back off, both bruised and panting.

“Hood, come on,” Dick tries again, but none of Jason’s fury has dimmed in the slightest.

“No. Don’t talk to me. I don’t want anything to do with you or that bat bastard,” Jason states. “So just fuck right the hell off.”

This time, Dick doesn’t try to stop him when he leaves.

Barbara calls him on his trip back to the city. It’s clear from the moment she speaks that she’d been in on it too and Jason’s fury flares bright. They end up snarling at each other through the coms, Babs throwing words that cut deep in ways only she can manage.

“_You use your trauma as an excuse to take your anger out on other people. Newsflash, Jason, that doesn’t make you special; it makes you just like every other asshole out there_.”

He’ll never admit how much the words sting, but he buries them down with all the other pain he’s taken in his lifetime. Tucks them away in the same place he’d tucked other words of hers. _You’ll never be Dick Grayson_.

By the time he makes it back, Bruce is long gone. The body had turned up in Burnley, _not_ in the Bowery, so the whole thing had been unnecessary from the start. Jason goes home to lick his wounds and nurse his wounded pride, but word of what happened between him and Dick spreads through the family. And of course, since he’d attacked Dick—the _favorite_ brother—for his part in Bruce’s plan, it’s not long before he’s at odds with every other member of the family. They make it abundantly clear whose side they’re on.

Jason had been kidding himself to think things would ever be different. He was always going to be the outsider here. To hope for anything more would be stupid, and no matter what the others believe, he _isn’t _stupid.

He sticks to his territory after that, and the rest of the bats do the same. They don’t see him and he doesn’t see them, and that’s the way he likes it.

Exactly one week later, he’s halfway through his night on his normal patrol route when he hears a dog whining and barking in an alleyway. It’s not the typical angry barking of a stray he’s used to hearing in this part of town. It’s high pitched and panicky. More like yelps than barks. Curious, Jason peeks down into the alley and watches it run to the street and bark frantically before running back to what looks like a body laid out on the ground.

Jason leaps down immediately, moving to the body as fast as he can. The dog barks at him in the same panicky yelping, but he ignores it because the body is of a young girl. She’s somewhere between ten and twelve, and has been so badly beaten that he can hardly make out any facial features—can hardly imagine that she’s even _alive_. But when he yanks off his glove and gets his fingers to her neck, he feels a pulse, small and thready with too much time in between beats, but a pulse nonetheless. He switches on his com for the first time in a week, “O, get an ambulance to my location!”

_“Hood, what—” _Barbara starts talking, voice annoyed and confused. He cuts her off, panicked.

“Ambulance _now_!”

There’re so many injuries, Jason can’t even figure out where to start. She’s got ribs clearly broken, blood gathering under her skin, making it bulge out, likely compressing down on her lungs. He rips off his helmet and puts his ear to her chest. She’s breathing but it’s slow, wet and raspy. Too shallow of breaths. Her lung might be punctured too. He pulls a knife, hoping to relieve the pressure. He needs a tube to help drain, and something else with which he can re-inflate her lung—but he’s got nothing on him and as he searches, her pulse and breathing both slow even more.

“No, no, no, don’t do this to me, come on, stay with me,” he speaks urgently. Her eyes flicker and he leans towards her face. “Come on, hold on. Help is coming,” he tells her quickly. “You just gotta hold on for me, okay?”

One black eye opens; the other is too swollen. She blinks up at him fuzzily for a moment before the eye goes teary and afraid. He yanks the domino off his face and meets her gaze.

“You’re alright, you’re alright, I got you,” he promises her. The tears spill over but she doesn’t look quite as scared anymore. “Help is coming. What’s your name?”

She mumbles out something and Jason thinks he catches something that could sound like Becca. There’s blood on her teeth, spilling out her lips. “Becca? Rebecca? Your name is Rebecca?”

The kid nods ever so slightly.

“Okay Rebecca, help is coming okay? We’re going to get you to a hospital and you’re going to be alright. I just need you to stay with me until they get here. Can you do that for me?”

She looks scared again and she tries to take a breath but it’s not working. Her hand twitches towards him and he takes it, careful of her broken fingers. She clutches weakly at his hand and stares up at him, teary and afraid. She’s dying.

“No, no, no,” Jason panics, hitting the com with his other hand. “O, where the _fuck _is that ambulance?”

Her voice is tinny in his ear. “_Five minutes out. She’s… she’s not going to make it, Jason._” She must have tapped into his HUD, can probably see the girl from his helmet’s position on the ground. Knows that it was already too late before Jason even found her.

He snarls in fury but knows it’s true. The girl’s eye is wide as she grips his hand as much as she can, and Jason can feel tears filling his own eyes. God, she’s not going to make it. Even if the best doctors in the whole damn world had all the equipment they would need and were in this alley with them right now, she still wouldn’t make it.

It’s not fair. She’s a _child_.

The tears spill over. “Shh, sweetheart,” Jason whispers, scooping her up and cradling her to his chest. God, he can _feel _the broken bones inside her. But no child deserves to die alone on the dirty alley ground. If she’s going to die, better to at least die in the arms of someone who gives a shit. “You’re alright,” he tells her gently. “Everything’s going to be alright.”

She stares up at him, still holding his hand. It’s so small in his and all but one of her fingers is broken. 

“It’s okay, you’re alright,” he continues to soothe, keeps his gaze locked on hers. Her eye darts around fearfully for a moment before it fixes back on his face and then it calms a little once more. “Everything’s going to be alright, sweetheart,” he says again, voice thick. “You’re safe. You’re warm. All the pain is going to go away.”

Her hand twitches in his and then it’s no more than half a minute before it goes limp and the eye that had been focused on his face goes lifeless along with the rest of her body. Jason curls over her corpse, so small, and lets out a yell of fury and pain. She was so young. Who the fuck had done this? Who the fuck had left her to die, here of all places?

A few more tears spill out and he scrubs them away angrily, still holding her close. The dog’s gone quiet but it’s stayed in the alleyway with them. It’s a stray for sure. Mangy and boney, covered in dirt with no collar. Definitely a mutt. It’s a large breed but given its state he can’t even begin to guess what color the dog actually is. Its tail is as boney as the rest of him and it’s got one ear that sticks up and another that flops down. It whines when Jason looks at him and they sit there for a moment, mourning the dead child together.

Then the dog growls and Jason looks up to see Batman standing at the mouth of the alleyway. He’d beat the ambulance that was now pointless, and he’d beat the police too. Jason wonders what the hell he’s doing in his part of town in the first place, but then his brain makes the connection. The serial killer case Bruce had been working with the bodies being dumped in alleyways across the city, each a week apart. The reason why Bruce had manipulated him out of the city the week before. He’d been expecting that body to be dropped in the Bowery, but he was wrong. It was this week’s body instead.

Bruce and GCPD had somehow managed to keep the details of the case from the press so Jason had only known the basics until now. Now he needs to know _everything_.

“Have they all been children?” he growls angrily up at Bruce. He hasn’t let go of Rebecca. Her body is not yet cold, and he refuses to lay her back down on the filthy ground of this godforsaken alleyway in the middle of the Bowery. She deserves better.

Bruce remains silent and the fury rages within Jason once more. This time he shouts. “_Have they all been children_?!”

Again, Bruce says nothing, and Jason takes that for the confirmation it is. His body trembles in rage, but he keeps his hands gentle where they’re still cradling Rebecca in his lap. Her little hand in his once more.

He can hear sirens in the distance now, for all the good it does. Police, ambulance, they’re all too fucking late. Rebecca’s dead and her murderer—_torturer—_is still out there somewhere. Well, not for long if Jason has anything to say about it. He almost demands to know whether or not Bruce has any suspects, but he bites his tongue. He’s going to be watched for the next few days as it is. He can’t afford to tip them off.

In front of him, Bruce crouches down. The dog continues to growl low in its throat, but it doesn’t attack. Bruce’s gloved hand finds Jason’s domino, where he’d ripped it off and tossed it aside so Rebecca could see his eyes—know he wasn’t going to be another person who hurt her. Bruce picks it up and holds it out for him.

Jason stares at it. His hands are full.

“Jason,” Bruce says gently, speaking for the first time. The sirens are getting louder. They’re going to have company very soon and his face is bare. _But his hands are full_.

Bruce reaches out carefully with the domino and gently presses it back on. Jason hates his slow cautious movements, the light way he holds his head in his hands. Like he’s fragile. Like _he’s _the victim here and not Rebecca. He wants to snarl and fight but there’s a dead child in his arms and now is not the time nor place.

“I can take her now,” Bruce says quietly, holding out his arms.

Jason pulls her closer, unwilling to let her go. Unwilling to give her to Bruce. Bruce has been working this case for weeks now, but that hadn’t saved Rebecca. He’d been _too late _to save Rebecca. She’d been beaten to death and as he looks down at her small body, he can’t help but wonder if his had looked similar when he was dying from being beaten and blown up by the Joker. Had his face been this swollen? Had his bones been so visibly broken under his skin?

Again, he itches to demand whether or not Bruce has any suspects—whether or not he _knows_ who’s done this but hasn’t acted because he doesn’t have the proof. He wants to demand whether or not Rebecca’s death is Bruce’s fault.

But he can’t. He can’t tip his hand.

The police are coming. So’s an ambulance. They’ll need to take Rebecca, catalogue her injuries, check for evidence that hasn’t been tainted by Jason’s body. It’ll give him the time he needs to get the case files from the police and bat computer, as well as lose the tails he’s bound to get, and relocate to his most secret of safe houses. They’ll be watching him with eagle eyes after this, worried this will set him off and send him off on a violent spree.

They’re idiots.

They don’t understand him at all. There is no setting him off, that’s not the way it works. And he doesn’t go on violent sprees. Jason kills when the situation demands. That’s it. Plain and simple. He doesn’t lose his temper and murder any asshole that pisses him off. Every kill is a decision that he makes, and every decision is carefully weighed and measured with a cool head. He only ever kills because the person deserves to die.

It’s been a while since he’s come across someone he felt was evil to the core, irredeemable, and in need of being put down. Whatever monster did this to a child? That fucker can_not_ be allowed to live.

Bruce will hunt him down with all he has, get whatever evidence he needs to put him away for life eventually, but that’s it. And in that time, another child might be tortured and beaten to death. Jason _will not _allow that to happen. He doesn’t mind being the one to do what needs to be done if no one else will, even if it means losing his place in the family. Rebecca is worth that. Every other child who was tortured and left to die all alone is worth it even if Jason’s run out of Gotham when it’s over—even if they try to throw him back in Arkham, even if they cast him out and never speak to him again. Those lives are worth more.

“Jason,” Bruce says again, still gentle. He’s still holding his arms out and the sirens are still getting louder. They’re close now. Jason needs to get lost if he doesn’t want to get stuck here for the next few hours. And he needs the time to disappear properly.

“Her name is Rebecca. You look out for her,” Jason growls, threatening. “You make sure they treat her with respect.”

“I will,” Bruce promises solemnly. He means it, of course. Jason knows that. Bruce, for all his faults, is a good man. He’s just not _enough_.

Reluctantly Jason moves Rebecca into Bruce’s arms. Her head shifts limply against the bat on the man’s chest and Jason reaches out and gently closes her eye, rests a hand on her head and silently makes his oath.

_I swear I will make the person who did this to you suffer as much as they made you suffer._

Then he grabs his helmet off the ground and stands. The mutt looks up at him and Jason meets its eyes. The dog had found Rebecca. It’d been trying to get someone to come help, yelping and running to the mouth of the alleyway, trying to alert someone, but unable to leave the girl completely alone. He feels a pang of sympathy for the dog and in that moment feels more connected to it than any living and breathing human being on the planet.

“Come on, mutt,” he says gently, cocking his head towards the alley entrance. As he starts walking, the dog follows. They leave the alleyway behind. They leave Rebecca’s body with Bruce. 

“_Jason_,” Barbara says softly in his ear. She’s sympathetic now, but Jason hasn’t forgotten their fight, the words she’d thrown like daggers. She may be sympathetic but that doesn’t mean she won’t be watching him suspiciously.

He doesn’t want her sympathy anyway. It’s full of double standards.

“Don’t fucking talk to me,” he snarls, cutting the channel. She can open it back up if she wants to, but she doesn’t. Jason makes his way back to his current safe house with the dog trotting beside him. He wants the tracker in the com to show he went home. He wants them to think they have time, that he’s in for the night. In reality though, he’s there for less than ten minutes. Just long enough to grab some gear and feed the dog some leftover meat from his fridge.

The mutt’s apparently decided it’s Jason’s now. It gobbles the food up in the span of seconds, and then when Jason leads it back out, it follows dutifully, tail wagging.

Within the next couple of hours, they’re settled in Jason’s emergency safe house, dog fed and sleeping happily on a pile of blankets by the couch where Jason sits with the laptop he’s been holding onto specifically for situations like this. He might have been playing nice up until now, but he’d also taken care to get caught up on all the security upgrades to the bat computer and Oracle’s tech. He’s not as good as she is, or even as good as Tim is, but he knows how Babs and Bruce operate and he knows how they track and he’s pretty sure he’s safe.

He also has a back door into the bat computer and has for a while now. They underestimate him regularly. They think he’s impulsive. A hot head. In reality, he’s a planner. Usually it bugs the shit out of him, being so constantly looked down on, but tonight he doesn’t mind. Tonight, it means that he gets his hands on the case files of a serial killer.

There were three girls before Rebecca, ranging from ages nine to thirteen. All sexually assaulted and then beaten to the same extreme. The lists of injuries are long and sordid enough to show that the perpetrator is both creative and a sexual sadist. The torture is brutal, and Jason only gets that far before he’s seeing red and wants to scream his lungs out.

Instead of screaming, he takes a breath and moves the laptop to the side. He needs a break. It’s too much on top of Rebecca dying in his arms. He can’t think of the sexual assault she’d also faced and see a long list of injuries that would be comparable to hers. He needs to breathe before he goes insane.

The bathroom of the safehouse is where he ends up, turning on the faucet in the tub to something a little warmer than lukewarm.

He calls to his new friend. “Come on, dog, you’re smelling up my safe house.”

The dog trots into the bathroom then tilts his head at the running water curiously. Jason kneels by the tub and splashes his hand in the water. “Come on, come check it out.”

It approaches with caution, but upon seeing the water, it immediately backs out of the room.

“Oh come on, don’t be like that,” Jason sighs, standing up. He’s not all that surprised when the dog makes a run for it.

“Hey, do I look like I’m in the mood to chase you around? Come on now, I’ve been nice, right? I’ve given you food and a bed, so what if I don’t want you to smell? Trust me, we’re both going to be happier.”

The dog stands in the middle of the living room and lets Jason approach. “You gonna work with me then?” he asks, coming closer. And it looks like it is, but then, the second he gets within arms’ length, it bolts again.

Jason slumps where he stands. It’s been a shitty ass day and he doesn’t have the energy for this. “You have _got_ to be kidding me.”

The dog stands in the kitchen eyeing him in what he would swear is a challenge. “Oh, it’s on, mutt.”

It takes longer than he will ever admit to a living soul to wrangle the dog into the bathroom. It yelps and barks and wriggles in his arms, but Jason keeps his hold solid. When the dog’s feet touch the water, the yelping turns angry.

“Oh stop it you big baby, it’s just water,” Jason grouses, wrestling the dog into the tub. It tries twice to scramble right back out, but he maneuvers it back in each time. It barks angrily in his face in response.

“Oh yeah?” Jason gives it a dirty look. “You think I’m enjoying this anymore than you are? Trust me, pal, this is _not _how I imagined spending my night so you can just fuck right off.”

The dog growls low in its throat but holds still as Jason uses a cup to pour water over it and get it properly drenched. Once he adds the shampoo into the equation, the dog gets worked up again.

“Whoa!” Jason jerks his soapy hand away just in time to avoid the snap from canine jaws. He glares and points his finger at the dog’s face grumpily. “You watch it.”

The dog glares right back up at him and very deliberately, snaps in the direction of his pointed finger.

“Well aren’t you a ballsy little shit,” Jason declares, torn between annoyance and feeling reluctantly impressed. He tries for reason again, feeling utterly silly for talking to the dog like it’s a human, but he can’t shake the feeling of connection he has with the canine. “Look, trust me on this, you’re going to feel a lot better when we’re done here, okay? But you’re holding up the process.”

The dog continues to glare at him but doesn’t snap anymore, so slowly and cautiously, Jason returns to shampooing.

It takes three washes to discover the dog is actually white. And a boy. By the time he’s brushed and dried, he’s actually looking pretty decent, though there are patches of tender skin here and there and he’s still far too skinny. He’ll make a full recovery though, Jason knows.

“What should we call you, huh?” he asks as the dog wags its tail and moves about the room energetically, clearly loving being clean despite the rough beginnings. Jason himself is now soaking wet and covered in what he would swear is more dog hair than his new friend has all over his body.

“Pratchett?” he asks after some consideration, thinking of the author and how utterly ridiculous some of his characters are. “How do you feel about Pratchett?”

Pratchett brushes past him to sniff out a piece of floor that must have once had food dropped on it or something, and Jason figures that’s agreement enough. “Pratchett it is.”

He takes his own long shower, stopping once to clean out the drain from the dog fur that stayed in the tub, and once he’s done, he moves back to the laptop. He’s not ready, but he knows he never will be. Those girls need his help anyway though so he goes back to the files.

Alicia Martinez—thirteen years old and a runaway from the foster system—had been missing for six months before her body was found in an alleyway in the Upper West Side. Unlike Rebecca, she’d been dead by the time she was dumped there. She was beaten brutally, but not quite as brutally as Rebecca. Definitely with less finesse though, meaning she died faster with fewer injuries.

Kelly Reynolds hadn’t even been reported missing when she turned up in an alley in Coventry exactly one week after Alicia Martinez. Her shit of a stepfather said he figured she’d just run off and thought good riddance. She was nine and there’d been a clear escalation in the level of beating from Alicia to Kelly. Unlike Alicia, she’d been alive when she was dumped. They couldn’t know for sure how long she’d been there before she actually died, but she’d likely died alone, hurting and afraid. The brutality of the beating had increased but so had the finesse.

They still didn’t know the identity of the third girl who’d been found in Burnley the night Jason’s relationship with the family had gone to shit. They thought she was ten or eleven, but there were no reports of a missing child matching her description. Bruce theorized her family were likely undocumented migrants, afraid to come forward to report their missing child. She too had still been breathing when she was dumped.

Alicia and Kelly had been from Chinatown and the Hill respectively—opposite ends of the city. There’s no telling where the bastard had picked them up and there’s no way of knowing where the third girl had come from at all. A quick search of missing children reports doesn’t turn up Rebecca either, so Jason’s unsure of where she was from or where the bastard might have gotten her. Bruce has a detailed profile written up and 6 potential suspects, based on sketchy potential witness descriptions, locations of the body dumps, etc. Three of them can be ruled out based on when Rebecca was likely dumped.

Jason studies the profiles of the three remaining suspects carefully, takes in every detail Bruce has gathered on their lives, finds a few more details of his own, and thinks.

All three are equally possible. All three have implications of sexual sadism in their backgrounds, they all have hints of the arrogance and psychopathic tendencies necessitated by the profile. It could be any of them.

But his gut is pushing him towards Edward Doyle, investment banker and premium grade asshole.

Doyle’s mother was murdered in a B&E gone wrong when he was in his twenties. At least, that was the speculation. The murderer was never caught, and his mother’s brain was bashed in pretty good. Could have really been a B&E gone wrong, or it could have been Doyle’s first kill. He didn’t have an alibi for the murder. Then there are two cases of domestic violence involving past girlfriends, but the cases never went anywhere for no good reason that Jason can find. The evidence is fairly damning against Doyle, but Doyle managed to escape the consequences each time. Regardless, it’s clear the man has a temper and isn’t afraid of getting physical.

If it is Doyle, there’s no chance that Alicia was Doyle’s first. Behaviors like his tend to start smaller and escalate over time. Maybe he killed his mother, maybe he knocked some girlfriends around, but it didn’t go from that to the extreme of raping then beating young girls to death and leaving them in alleyways.

His gut is telling him Doyle’s his guy, which means there’s part of the transition he’s missing. If Jason were a betting man, he’d put money on Doyle having a thing for beating the shit out of working girls in his past. That kind of thing isn’t something that’s normally reported to the police though, which means he’ll need to hit the streets with Doyle’s picture.

There are working girls all over the city, but Doyle’s fancy penthouse apartment is on the Upper East Side and that’s only a skip away from the Bowery. A sexual sadist like Doyle would have targeted the most vulnerable of the vulnerable populations, hence Alicia, Kelly, Rebecca and the poor girl whose name they still don’t know. Luckily Jason’s been on a first name basis with almost every working girl in the Bowery and Crime Alley for the past few months now and they’ll all be more than happy to give him the information he needs.

Pratchett doesn’t like being left behind the following night, but he’s easily bribed with food. Jason makes his usual rounds about his patrol route. He knows his territory is probably being monitored so he keeps to his routine. Luckily, checking on the girls is part of that.

“Hey, Tanya,” he says, greeting one of the girls who’s more comfortable with him. While all of the girls tend to welcome him, some still find him intimidating.

“Hiya Hood,” she smiles at him, giving him a customary sizing up look. “You finally want some company?”

“Nah, just got a dog. All the company I need,” he answers, but pulls the picture up on his phone. “You know this guy? John that’s into the rougher stuff,” he asks, passing her the phone so she can take a good look at his picture.

Tanya’s mouth twists as she looks at the photo. “Maybe. What’s he drive?”

“Black AMG. I don’t know that he’d drive it here though.”

“Maybe,” she says again. “Lemme ask around and make sure it’s the guy I’m thinkin’ of.”

He waves her on and she heads over to some of the other girls down the street. He watches the discussion take place, and after a few minutes, Tanya comes back frowning.

“Well?” Jason asks, taking the phone back.

“Yeah, he used to come around a lot. Really into the rough stuff and definitely seemed to like the younger girls best if you know what I mean. A few of the girls were willing every now and then if they were desperate because he paid pretty well. But last year he beat a friend of Crystal’s almost to death so no one will touch him now. Hasn’t been around in a while. Probably found different hunting grounds.”

“Yeah,” Jason says, grinding his teeth under his helmet. “Thanks,” he adds, handing her enough cash to split amongst the group. “What happened to the friend? I guess she didn’t call the police.”

Tanya shook her head. “Nah, she was barely sixteen. It messed her up pretty bad though. She overdosed a couple months ago.”

Jason takes a slow breath in. “Okay.”

“You gonna take care of him?” Tanya asks.

“Yeah,” he tells her. Because even if Doyle isn’t the one beating children to death, he’s a shitbag that deserves a personal one-on-one with the Red Hood. But now more than ever his gut is telling him Doyle’s his guy.

“Thanks.”

“Anytime.”

He takes care to finish his patrol before heading back and tapping back into the bat computer. It seems Bruce thinks Doyle’s a real contender as well, because he’s set up surveillance on him for when he leaves his big fancy investment bank in the evening to when he returns there in the morning. Easy enough to work around. Jason plans to break into Doyle’s apartment while he’s at the office and see what he can find. Then, as long as Doyle comes home, he’ll have all the time he wants to work on him.

So far, each of the girls have been dumped exactly a week apart. Based on the injuries, Bruce thinks they’re being held for two to three days each. That leaves two or three more days before he grabs his next one.

Plenty of time as long as it’s actually Doyle. If it’s not him, Jason will only have one, _maybe _two more nights to weed out the other two suspects.

He’ll manage.

He waits until Doyle’s at work and the man’s current shadow, Dick, is off duty for a few hours. Then he breaks into Doyle’s apartment to wait. The place is almost compulsively orderly, which is a red flag all on its own. There’s no clutter anywhere, no dust, no mess, and everything in the apartment is placed exactly so, down to the medicine cabinet full of far more skin and haircare products than a man in his thirties should need. Other than that, there’s no overt signs of psychopathic sadism. No stash of hardcore porn under the bed, no torture devices or even adult toys. Jason’s thorough in his search.

It doesn’t rule Doyle out, just makes him careful. The lack of so much as condoms in the apartment is more suspicious than not. Jason takes his time and carefully searches the whole place from top to bottom.

The place might as well be a showroom for all the personal effects.

He walks about the place for another hour after he’s finished digging through Doyle’s belongings. There’s something weird about master closet. It’s accessed through the master bathroom, and certainly bigger than any closet Jason’s had since coming back to life, but somehow not as big as he had expected. Not as big as it could be given the apartment’s footprint.

Jason stands in the closet and stares at the Tom Ford suits and shiny custom Italian made shoes with narrowed eyes before a hunch pushes him to dig out the penthouse layout online. He finds it on a realtor website from a few years before when the place had been for sale. It gives the dimensions of each room, which is how he finds out that the closet is a third of the size it should be.

His heart beats a little faster. He _knows _he’s on the right track and he moves the shit in the closet out of the way until he finds the seams for an access panel. Popping off the cover, he takes in the handprint scanner and grins. He’s hit pay dirt, he knows it. Yes, it’s possible that it’s just a safe room. That there’s nothing inside. People as rich as Doyle tend to be paranoid, after all. But Jason’s gut is telling him that isn’t the case. That he’ll find all the proof he needs inside.

He just has to wait for the jackass to get home.

It’s a more difficult wait than he anticipates. Now that he’s so close, he wants Doyle to suffer and he’s impatient for it. Especially when it hits 8pm and he still isn’t home. He shouldn’t be taking another girl so soon, but it’s possible he’s out scouting. If the Bats get to him before Jason does, he’s going to scream.

Doyle doesn’t get the security of prison; he gets to die by the same methods that he murdered those girls. If the Bats get him first, Jason will break him out of prison to get the justice Rebecca and the others deserve. He doesn’t want to wait that long. He needs Doyle to walk into his apartment under his own power.

At 8:42, he gets his wish. He meets him at the door with a needle and Doyle goes down easily. Jason turns on some lights that will be visible through the closed shades, putters about the place, turns on the TV, just in case any of the Bats are doing audio surveillance as well. Then he drags Doyle off to his master closet and uses his hand to open the safe room hidden there.

It’s exactly what Jason expects, a combination of sleek white lines and medieval torture devices. There are pictures on the walls of girls screaming in agony. He recognizes Rebecca and the three other girls, but there are also pictures of some older teenagers and younger women. Prostitutes, most likely. He shakes with rage and drags Doyle into the room, secures him with the same chains he’s used to secure his victims, then he waits for the short-term sedative to wear off.

A few minutes later, Doyle begins to stir. His eyes blink open, flicking about the space, dilating automatically as he realizes what room he’s in, sees his pictures on the walls. When he tries to move and realizes he can’t, he finally notices the vigilante in the room beside him.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m the Red Hood,” Jason replies calmly. “But tonight, I’m also judge, jury and executioner.”

Doyle snorts, list twisting up sharply as his eyes glint with something that looks like a dim shade of the Joker’s mania. The man’s a psychopath, it’s clear as day. He’s not even bothering to hide it now, here in this room where he usually holds so much power.

“You’re going to kill me?” he scoffs.

“Eventually.”

“You can kill me, but it won’t matter. I’ll never die. Not after my work. I’ll be remembered for all the good that I’ve done,” he says, looking over to the pictures on the wall—his monument to his work. His grin sharpens in pleasure.

“The only thing you’ll be remembered as is a cautionary tale,” Jason promises him coldly. “A reminder of what the Red Hood will do to you if you hurt children in his city.”

Doyle laughs as Jason picks up a tire iron from amongst the various items in the room. He’s not bothered. The monster won’t be laughing for long.

A couple hours in, he takes a break. Leaving Doyle in the safe room, he moves about the penthouse, turning off the lights in the living room and kitchen along with the TV. He then turns on the light in the bedroom for the length of time it might take a man like Doyle to get ready for bed. Then he turns them all back off and returns to the safe room.

Doyle whimpers as he comes back in, the cowardly bastard. It’s only been a few hours, but he’s already changed his tune, has been trying to bargain with the Red Hood for his life, offering to give him all his money, pleading for him to stop.

It’s amazing how much pain can change a person.

Jason’s got six more hours before Dick will expect Doyle to leave for work. It’s not near enough time given what Rebecca and the others suffered, but he is nothing if not efficient, and he’ll make the most of every second he’s got.

He doesn’t wait to let Doyle die in an alley. He wants Doyle to die here in this room, where he’d once felt invincible. He waits hours after Doyle starts begging for death to let the man die. Waits until he can’t afford to wait anymore, and even then, he makes it as slow and agonizing as he can given the time constraints. Then he takes four of the pictures from the wall and one of Doyle’s knives and tucks them away. Doyle has his own private elevator, so it’s easy to smuggle the body out of the penthouse and into the trunk of the vehicle Jason had left in the parking garage. He leaves the building in the car with Dick none the wiser. He could be any one of the hundreds of morning commuters living in the building, and Dick’s only looking for Doyle’s AMG.

Jason takes Doyle to the alley where he’d found Rebecca. In full Red Hood gear, he drops the man’s filthy carcass. He takes the pictures he’d taken from Doyle’s room—one for Rebecca, Alicia, Kelly, and the poor girl who remains nameless, then with Doyle’s own knife, he stabs them into Doyle’s chest. After that, he calls the body in to the police.

_Let it be a message_, Jason thinks, to all the scumbags in Gotham. You hurt children in this city, GCPD might not do anything about it. Batman might not do anything about it. But the Red Hood is out there, and he’ll make you pay for it in blood.

He stares down at Doyle’s body, the broken bones, the cuts, the bruises, the burns. He feels satisfaction, but no joy. Rebecca’s still dead. She still suffered. But hopefully she’ll be able to rest peacefully knowing that her murderer is gone from this world. It’s the only peace Jason can offer her, and he hopes it means as much to her as that peace would mean to him. And if it doesn’t, well at least Doyle will never be able to hurt anyone like he’d hurt her ever again.

He’s tired, he realizes, turning away from the body and making his way to the rooftops, to the sounds of sirens in the distance. He hasn’t slept since before he found Rebecca, but it’s more than just that physical tiredness.

It’s this city. It’s the Bats. It sucks the life out of people and only rarely offers anything back in return. How many more monsters like Doyle are lurking in the shadows with no one willing to do anything about it? How can Bruce take the lives of monsters like Doyle and weigh them against the lives of innocents like Rebecca and decide those lives are equal? How is he not living under a mountain of crushing guilt for the lives he failed to save because of his _principles_? How can the family look at Jason and decide _he’s _the one in the wrong—the violent and unstable one because he isn’t willing to sacrifice lives of the innocent for those like Doyle?

Jason knows he’ll never understand it.

His phone rings in his jacket pocket and he stares at Barbara’s number for a moment before answering it on a whim, sending the call to his helmet.

“_Hood_,” Barbara’s voice sounds in his ear, computer modulator on so that she won’t give any emotion away. That’s enough to tip him off to the kind of conversation they’re about to have.

“O,” he replies calmly.

“_Batman’s found Doyle’s body. He’s furious and coming for you. You need to get out of town if you don’t want a one way ticket to Arkham_.”

Jason’s got no idea why she’s bothering to warn him. He isn’t about to question her motivation though. He’s _not_ going back to Arkham and wouldn’t necessarily mind a break from the Bats and this hell city. God knows he deserves one.

“Thanks for the heads up. Tell B to check Doyle’s master closet for the evidence. Maybe there’ll be something in there to help you find Rebecca and the third girl’s family. They deserve to know what happened to their little girls.”

Barbara doesn’t say anything and after a moment, Jason cuts the call. He knows what she thinks of him and he doesn’t need her approval or understanding. Still, he’ll remember the heads up.

Jason swaps vehicles for one owned by an alias that he’s pretty sure the Bats don’t know about yet, then he picks up a duffle bag and Pratchett from his safe house. He’s already across the Trigate Bridge and well into Sommerset by the time his phone rings again. It’s Bruce this time and the same whim that caused him to answer for Barbara has him answering now.

“Red Hood speaking,” he greets in a chipper tone.

“_Jason_,” Bruce growls, sounding truly furious.

“Hey, B. Find the evidence I left you?”

Bruce ignores the question. “_We don’t kill, regardless of how terrible the crime! We. Don’t. Kill._”

Jason’s tone sobers immediately. “Correction; _you _don’t kill. There’s never going to be a world where I take a chance that another child will suffer like Rebecca suffered by letting that monster live. You might be able to take that risk and think it’s acceptable, but I can’t. It’ll never happen, B, no matter what it means for you and me. Those kids’ lives are worth more than me getting to have a family,” he finishes, grim but firm in his belief of the statement as an absolute truth.

There’s a long pause before Bruce finally speaks again. “_Don’t come back_.”

To his own immense surprise, Jason laughs, mocking and amused. “Yeah, in your dreams, old man.”

And then he tosses the phone out the open car window. He’s still tired. It’s been something like three days since he’s slept, but a monster has been slain, the morning sun is bright on the road, and Pratchett is in the seat beside him, panting happily as they head west.

Jason’s had worse days.

**Author's Note:**

> It isn't my intention to bash Bruce in this fic, or any of other bats. They have their reason for not killing and those reasons are valid to them just like Jason's reasons for killing are valid to him. That's what makes the divide between them so hard. There's not really reconciling these two different sides. And it's all the more difficult because they love each other on top of it all. Please don't bash any of the characters in the comments.


End file.
